I would like to take a moment to talk about a little thing called Hometalk. I’ve mentioned it before, but for those of you who haven’t heard of Hometalk, I think it can best be explained like this: If Pinterest and Facebook got together and had a love child, and that child only ever talked about home-and-garden related topics, and you used that child to “clip stories” instead of “pinning images,” that would be Hometalk.

It’s pretty great.

Every once in a while, I’ll take a blog post that I’m particularly fond of and rewrite it a little bit for my Hometalk profile. Because if there’s one thing I like more than talking about myself, it’s talking about myself MORE and on DIFFERENT MEDIA OUTLETS.Continue Reading

You know, I almost didn’t write this post. Because the floor’s not done yet. And I thought about slacking and just not posting anything until the floor was done and I had a completed project to tell you about. But then I thought: No. You guys need to know about what I’ve been through in the last two weeks. You have a right to know. The good citizens of the world deserve to know the TRUTH…

Damn, that doesn’t sound very long, does it? Luckily I’ve made remarkable progress on the nursery over the past two weeks. To be specific: It is REMARKABLE how LITTLE progress I have made, given the time allotted.

Although I was off to a pretty good start when I came home one day to discover that Chris had pulled up the carpet.

And he was all like, “Ok boss, what’s the next step?” And I was all like, “This.”

You know, this may surprise some of you, but when you tell people that you are going to paint a carpet, the most common reaction is a mixture of doubt and disbelief, with a little bit of “I’m not sure I heard that correctly” thrown in for good measure.

Of course, there are some of you that would be like, “Of COURSE you’re going to paint the carpet! Because it will look TOTALLY RAD!!”

You people — the people who think that — you get it. You are my people. Because it looks totally freakin’ rad.

Fun fact: A “war of attrition” is defined as a military strategy in which a belligerent side attempts to win a war by wearing down its enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources.

I am the belligerent side. The transition strip battle must be won at all costs.

I’m not going to tell you that you should follow me on Facebook or Instagram*reverse psychology*. But if everybody who reads this blog followed me on one or the other, we could all save ourselves a lot of introductory paragraphs and back story. And who doesn’t like to save time? Just sayin’.

Anyway, after posting a picture of my bedroom without the bed, I seem to have gotten a lot of flack — mostly to the tune of “What are you doing now? Get back in the kitchen!” You people are relentless. So allow me to explain:

Three days of tiling and we’re almost done. We finished laying all of the whole tiles, which means we left the slowest part — cutting — for last. And baby, there are A LOT of cuts. Because I couldn’t be satisfied with simply laying square tiles on a diagonal, which pretty much doubles the number of cuts you have to do and makes things rather difficult. Oh no. For my very first tiling project, I chose to lay the tiles on a diagonal AND use a “running bond” or brick pattern.

I explained in this post our plan to tear up the kitchen floor, then lay it back down in an attempt to make it level. Well, we did it. And I think I can safely say that at the very least, it’s more level than it was.

We started on Saturday afternoon by carefully unscrewing the plywood sheathing that makes up our subfloor. We wanted to reuse it if possible, so we couldn’t just start cutting and ripping. It was slow work, but the hardest part was figuring out where to put everything — you don’t realize how much you use a floor until you don’t have one: